Many a mickle

ByGwyn Fisher

The latest on the move:
Not sure whether we can do the trip up North- funds and other stuff are making things tricky. We had planned to head up on Thursday. May not happen after all…
Atticus is staying with his grandparents who are reluctant to let him go. Which frankly beggars belief. Sally & I installed a “Doggy Door” in the garage so he now has free range with Martin’s tools and HAM radio.

The latest on consumption of media:
First off- Serenity is the best Sci-Fi film evah. I’m fixin’ to do a fully-fledged review. But in the meantime, see it.
Am nearing the end of Pratchett’s latest paperback- Going Postal, and is something of a return to form for him. Thoroughly enjoyable.

The latest on boring tech stuff (seriously, skip this):
Last photo taken with me PDA before it went for repair againI was more than happy to get my PDA working again and even had a 1GB SD card full of episodes of QI on it which I’d started to watch. I was starting to remember my American dictionary two-letter Scrabble word s better too. Anyroad, the screen suddenly went blank, the controls sluggish, next thing I knew it was powering off and refusing to come back to life. It’s going back to Texas today hopefully for a replacement and not another sub-par repair. If it happens again I’m going to angle for a new Treo.

Sally’s laptop- the saga continues. First off, it wasn’t connecting to the interweb and wouldn’t let me reinstall ME to fix it. Its internal floppy and CD-ROM don’t work, but i have an external CD-ROM so I managed to install XP on it. Then I partitioned off another section to install ME back on it, planning to remove the XP part later.., it rebooted with the (blank) ME partition in DOS, and now i can’t do nowt ‘cos it can’t use the USB CDROM nor the internal, nor the floppy. It’s now in pieces on the table and I’m going to take it to Downey Computer Repairs to see if they can fish the (impossible to find) hard drive out of it then give me a 44-40 pin adapter to install ME on it with my desktop. It’s frustrating stuff.

Sorry ’bout all that. Still aiming to get round to emails but there’s tons to do (and more webdesignery in the offing- I’m learning about Online Shopping Carts…) and until our plans coalesce there’s nowt much to say. Hang on in there, and in the absence of postings on this blog, have a gander’s at James Shaw’s blog which is extremely well written when it’s not about sport, which is, however you dress it, sport.

Also, coming soon to these pages: Anecdotes. I don’t have nearly enough anecdotes and need to work on some. It’s not enough to travel the world and come back with pretty photos and a blanket description of yer travels. So I’m going to work on some tales. This is partially inspired by Adam and Joe’s XFM radio show and the incredible oral history tradition that runs through the Cambell family.

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Empty nest syndrome

100_4402A quick pause as Ed (who’s done a grand job of blogging the last couple of weeks’ travels) left for Guanajuato and Daniel and Monica head for the land of stringent planning permission. It was grand to have everyone around, quite a start to 2005 and the fun doesn’t stop there, we’re counting down to Ms Duffy’s arrival…
So the year so far in summary, comment if you’d like elucidation on the following:
Monday: Mexican locksmiths, Breakneck speeds and Ian, Adriana, Jose, Sita, Daniel & Monica restaurant antics.
Tuesday: Breakfast in Cafe D’Val, Tonala for arts and crafts and monica and daniel’s ever expanding small bowl collection. Downtown Gwod and La Fuente cantina… 2 buck chuck
Wednesday: Intro to Flash MX 2004, Slow Food and Fast Times. 2 buck chuck
Thursday: Chapala, Mariachi, Ajijic, no Mexican Hat Dances. 2 buck chuck
Friday: Lie in, San Juan de Dios (mio que comi?), La I Latina (best restaurant evah), El Pull-Bar, Virtual bowling. 2 buck chuck
Saturday: Central camionera nueva, Adieus, The Perfect Client, Skype and Lemon Chicken. 2 buck chuck (if there’s any left…)

Shall return to complete sentences in the near future. But as I say, it’s been a fantastic couple of weeks, thanks to all concerned. Viva Calle Garibaldi!
2 buck chuck
New Year and Thereabouts Collage
PS. Only 2 games of scrabble in 10 days… shall get my fix in tomorrow and say hello to my old friends xu, xi, qi and qat

We interupt this blog for a party political broadcast

It’s Sita’s birthday today and so I shall acquiesce to her request:

Personal Message
could you post this on your site?

They’re all as bad as each other if you ask me, but at least Obama can roll his Rs convincingly.

I haven’t cracked a nut in years…

I’m doing my latest online poll on my telly habits and I get to tell them what I think about US TV. Eventually I get a 10 bucks Target voucher or summink. Here’s some highlights, starting with 60 minutes, dire US pseudonews:

Please indicate what you don’t like about 60 Minutes:

Its patronising presenters. Its dated look. Its holier than thou themes. And for the love of all things holy, the segment at the end, Curmudgeon’s Corner or whatever it’s called with Andy Rooney waxing geriatric on topics he knows nothing about. God I hate this program.

Please indicate what you don’t like about Extreme Makeover: Home Edition:

Can’t help feeling emotionally manipulated by it. Also throughout, there’s the nagging feeling that it’s just one big advertising-fest for companies providing the materials. And the presenter gets on my nerves no end. At the end of the episode I feel somehow tainted.

Five-way skypage

Grand chat with Bert, Stu, Anne (& me and Sita, hence 5) today via the interweb. It involved bert using his headphones as a mic, having Anne and Stu on speakerphone and bert with his head I’m not sure where. A webcam was involved for a bit too. 2005, who’d’ve thought it? Jet packs and protein pills tomorrow…

I hope you get your head around the 7 hour or so time difference, Annelise and thanks for the shout out in yer blog and all the encouragement in the comments. I’ll probably never make it to Oklahoma, because I couldn’t deal with having Oh What a Beautiful Morning buzzing round my synapses all the time…

100_2776Yesterday night Jose (driving) and I got pulled over by the police for no reason at all. Long hair, probably… Can’t they just leave us kids alone? No breathaliser or nowt, just flinging accusations at us and going through our pockets, frisking and all that. They found my PDA stylus in my wallet and were convinced it was a hash pipe of some kind. Mais non… Anyroad Jose talked his way out of everything and all was well with the world once more. Probably won’t be the last time. I used to get searched occaionally walking the 30 blocks from CEPE to the Casa Internacional when I was here last. They used to be concerned about my dictionary in me backpack, and my lack of photo ID. This was way back when when UK driving licences were scruffy-looking green printouts with a signature as proof of ID. The way things should be, I reckon… but I digress… luckily I’m such a clean-living example of humanity they can’t pin nowt on me. (please do not abuse the comments section)…

100_2786 Today found us at the Tianguis Cultural, a hippy market full of Batique, bongos, tie-die and pirated CDs/DVDs. I got some Cure stuff as they’re enjoying something of a renaissance in my affections, then on to Expo Venta Guadalajara 2005, where Sita made valuable new Tequila contacts. As far as trade shows go, it was a bit pants, erring on the side of quantity over quality, but at least Sita got to pose with the Panqui man.

Had a bit of a nap, did some designy stuff, guitaring, went out for tacos al pastor at the “Santa Cruz Taqueria” (Always end up at the Holy Cross, Seville, California, Gwod…), and then scrabble, vino and more El Rival Mas Debil. We’ve found an online classified ads for students in guadalajara and might be off chasing up some leads on shelving tomorrow too.

UC Irvine

The easiest border crossing yet… The only question they asked was how long I’d been in Guadalajara and whether I’d got Montezuma’s Revenge. Bizarre… Still I prefer questions about my gastrointestinal health to the usual barrage of interrogation they usually give me. On the plane they didn’t have any customs forms in English so they gave me a Spanish one, which in my sleepy state I filled in in Spanish. The customs bloke read it and saw “Country where passport issued” was Inglaterra. He crossed it out with a red pen and wrote “Mexico”. I despair at the US educational system and their Spanish teachers…

There was banks of fog at LAX so we ended up landing in Ontario Airport and hanging around for half an hour then flying back to LAX, so we got in a bit late. However I managed to sleep through both take offs, both landings and even breakfast so it’s all good.

Sita’s got a lovely little apartment here 5 minutes from Trader Joe’s so I’ve been working on various websites and keeping myself to myself. Later today we’re Downey bound. Strange internet setup here that varies between blisteringly fast and zilch and my lappy won’t connect because of lingering issues with the IE7 beta thing I stupidly installed 6 months ago… But all’s well. Intermittant blogging to follow, cheers!